Walter Russell delivered this address at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York on May 13, 1939, at the annual convention of The Eastern Electronic Association. Hydrogen is the most plentiful substance that the sun generates in its outer atmosphere, and the most plentiful of our outer atmosphere beyond twenty miles. Our oceans are inexhaustible storehouses of voided hydrogen, which can be regenerated to active hydrogen. I shall talk to you tonight about the reality of space as an equal partner with the solids of matter, which float in it. I shall also talk to you about the hydrogen age which is at our door, for an intimate knowledge of space is also at our door and it is that knowledge of space which will give us our hydrogen age. Also it will give us our new cosmogony. In fact, the very secrets of life and death, which have eluded man for ages, lie within a knowledge of space. This subject is very timely because of the concern of the present generation over the fuel problems of future generations. One of our distinguished scientists delivered an address recently, which was pessimistic in regard to future progress. My talk tonight is not only a more hopeful answer, but it is also a general protest against the expanding universe theory, which modern science has conceived out of misinterpretations of natural phenomena. This idea that the universe is committing suicide has grown out of the unbalanced, one-way theory of the universe created by modern science, which investigates matter to form its conclusions and as yet knows practically nothing about space. With a knowledge of space, the dying universe, and its authority in the unbalanced second law of thermodynamics would be impossible. Our distinguished scientist said that we had nearly reached the end of the tremendous progress of the last century. In fifty years from now, he states, we would be going on about as now with only slight improvements. In fifty years our oil supply will be exhausted; our coal will last for a thousand years, but we will probably not be able to get more work out of a pound of coal than we do now. Hence our enforced stoppage of progress. Let me quote him: There are, I think, no other possible sources of power of comparable cheapness. When the oil and coal are gone, we shall get our power directly from the sun through solar motors, or wind mills, or tidal machines, or else directly through growing and burning plants.
supply of hydrogen, the cheapest and best fuel the world has ever known, waiting for man to use it. Hydrogen is the most plentiful substance, which the sun generates in its outer atmosphere, and the most plentiful of our outer atmosphere beyond twenty miles. Also, our oceans are inexhaustible storehouses of voided hydrogen, which can be regenerated to active hydrogen. Before the whales were all killed, mans intelligence gave us kerosene and gas, then coal and gasoline. Before these are exhausted, his intelligence will give us hydrogen. Do you realize what the coming of hydrogen in plentiful quantities would mean to the world? Let me stimulate your imagination by picturing an ocean liner manufacturing its own fuel, as it is needed, from either the water under it or the air above it, in one room of the capacity of one or two of its coal bunkers. It would not even need storage space for extra supply, for the hydrogen generators would be in the very fire chambers under the boilers. Do not tell me that there is no hydrogen in air, for if you do, I will tell you that there is none in water. Water, air, hydrogen, and oxygen are not things; they are conditions of the light of the sun and the dark of space from which they sprang.
To comprehend my meaning, you must disabuse your minds of the idea that the elements are permanently existent, for they are not. Metals are entirely voided in their salts, oxides, and silicates, and both hydrogen and oxygen are as entirely voided by water as sound is voided by silence. There is no such thing as transmutation of one element into another. One never can become another for each is voided when another condition makes its continuance impossible and another one possible. Hydrogen flames leap for thousands of miles into the suns atmosphere, yet there is no hydrogen at all upon the suns surface until the time of its leaping into flame. If the amount of hydrogen which explodes from the suns surface in one week existed upon the sun, there would be no sun. It would explode. The sun generates hydrogen and burns it simultaneously, and an ocean liner could do the same. Elements are not things; they are conditions. Produce a certain condition which is the pattern for hydrogen, or carbon dioxide, or sodium chloride, and they appear from space into which they continually disappear when the conditions are favorable, exactly as apples appear as the solids of apples and disappear as the gases of apples when conditions favor each stage of each cycle. Science has already discovered the conditions necessary for producing hydrogen by voiding water, but by the primitive, cumbersome, and expensive method known as electrolysis. If the sun could speak, it would be very satirical about the inability of humans to perceive so obvious a thing as the suns method of solving its fuel problems in plentiful fashion.
from contact with other solids. For this reason, it is impossible for two particles of matter actually to come in contact with each other. Also, the path of every two solids in the universe is controlled by two foci, which keep the entire universe in balance. One of these foci represents density and the other one represents vacuity.
A NEW COSMOGONY
Time will not permit further development of this idea, so I will conclude by saying that the hydrogen age could be here within a year or two if it were not for the tremendous resistance set up by modern science to the most obvious simple truths of Nature. I know these secrets of space, which will give hydrogen to science, but my cosmogony is so radically different from that of modern science that every attempt to give voice to it meets with the usual fate of those whose ideas do not fit conventional patterns. In order that it may not be lost to the world, I have put all this knowledge of space and the electric octave wave from which all things come into a book called The Cosmic Plan.1 Any scientist who comprehends the principles laid down in that book can produce hydrogen the way the sun produces it, or the way space enfolds our planet with it. There are principles laid down in that book which will make a new world, but it cannot be printed until I can print it at my own expense because publishers submit my manuscripts to orthodox physicists for their approval of it. They might as well submit a book by Galileo to the Pope. The Cosmic Plan is a new cosmogony, which differs as much from this present one as the Copernican cosmogony differs from its Ptolemaic
predecessor. Naturally, the orthodox believer in the theory of the dying, one-way, unbalanced universe will not approve of a theory of a two-way, balanced, living universe. Scientists regard me as sort of an interloper in their difficult field, and I do not blame them a bit. As a sculptor I would feel the same about a physicist who thought he could revolutionize sculpture. They call me a mystic or an intuitive with a keen imagination, a person who does not use the recognized legitimate research laboratory methods of gaining knowledge.
1. The Cosmic Plan, originally printed in 1953 as the Russell Cosmogony, has been republished by the University of Science and Philosophy under the title, A New Concept of the Universe: A Brief Treatise on the Russell Cosmogony.